Friends combine love of cooking and take recipes on the road

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HOUSTON, TX – So, looking for a late-night Banh Mi in the middle of the lunch hour? Well, looky-here.

The Phamily Bites food truck came to fruition when childhood friends Mark Tran and Van Pham combined a love of home-style Vietnamese cooking with an unexpected downturn in the economy.

“I was in the telecommunications industry,’ Van Pham explains, ‘but when the industry changed, I got laid-off and, you know, I just followed my passion into cooking and really enjoying this.”

So they got down and dirty, mixing their favorite family recipes into a menu made for the road.

But chew on this: everything on this truck is homemade. And when they say Phamily bites, they mean “family” bites.

“These are my momma’s eggrolls,’ Pham says, slicing hot fresh eggrolls for a waiting customer. ‘These are homemade; they’re pork and shrimp eggrolls. She hand-makes them every day and we sell anywhere from about a hundred to three-hundred a day.”

The only thing not homemade is the Spam for the Spam Musubi. “Basically what it is, is teriyaki marinated spam on top of seasoned rice.”

And in the time they’ve been open and rolling, they’ve already made powerful friends.

“Bun B is awesome,’ Pham says. ‘I mean, he’s one of our biggest supporters. Obviously he’s a local celebrity here, but he comes out at least once or twice a week to support us.”

The idea is to build the business into a brick-and-mortar restaurant someday. But in the meantime, they’re happy taking their recipes to the street.

“Oh yeah, I mean, you meet great people,’ Mark Tran says. ‘We’ve made a lot of great friends.”